Category: Vegetarian

in cyberland we only drink diet coke

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When I tweeted on the Twitter recently that I was making Chocolate Coca Cola Cake, there was a massive flurry of like, two or three people tweeting back at me that they wanted the recipe. Never one to offend my constitchency, I obediently bring you…Chocolate Coca Cola Cake. Check out all those curvaceous C’s lined up like that. Nigella, you alliterative minx.

I’ve already told the story of how this was the first recipe I made from How To Be A Domestic Goddess in 2006, but the tl:dr version is that Tim bought it for me, even though we didn’t have any expensive-book-money kicking round, to cheer me up after some clothes I was pretty invested in got stolen off our washing line. What a nice fulla he is.
This recipe is fantastic – very reassuringly cake-like, nothing fancy here, but also like no other chocolate cake you’ve ever tasted. Yeah, the Coca-Cola might be a bit of an awkward-sounding ingredient, but it works I promise you. The flavour isn’t strident, but gives a slight lick of damp cinnamony fizziness. It’s easy as to make too – just melt and beat thoroughly till smooth. When I was a kid we never really had fizzy drink around (except on my birthdays when Mum made ice cream sodas) and I never buy it or drink it now but – there’s something SO good about the taste of a cold Coca-Cola. Which is exactly what Coca-Cola would like me to think, but there it is.
Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake

From Nigella Lawson’s amazing, amazing, How To Be A Domestic Goddess

200g plain flour
250g sugar (brown sugar is good)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
125 mls buttermilk (or 125 mls half yoghurt half millk)
125g butter
2 T cocoa powder
175mls Coca-Cola

Preheat oven to 180 C/375 F and put in a baking sheet/biscuit tray to heat up. Butter and paper-line a 22-23cm springform tin.

In a large pan, gently heat the Coca-Cola, cocoa and butter together till the butter melts. In another bowl sift together the dry ingredients and pour in the buttery cola. Whisk in the yoghurt and egg, mixing everything really well. Pour into the tin and bake for 40 minutes or until cooked through.
Nigella has a recipe for icing that goes with it but it makes a way huge amount. What I did was mix together 1/3 cup Coca-cola, 2 tablespoons cocoa, and enough icing sugar to make a smooth, pourable icing. Even so this made way too much and it flowed over the plate and pooled all over the benchtop. It took so long to clean it up.
I made this cake to eat with the band Alex The Kid during Tim’s and my interview with them for our blog 100s and 1000s. It was a fun afternoon, and as soon as they left I grabbed my photo and took a couple of snaps. But I waited till they were done. You don’t want to hinder people’s ability to eat this stuff.
So good.
Check out, if you will, out the sweet coasters Tim and I made! Neither of us tend to go in for crafty cute stuff but something about this project we found in the latest issue – finding old coasters, cutting up pages of old books, glueing them together and spraying with fix-y stuff – appealed. To be honest Tim ended up doing most of it but I spotted the book about the galaxy, and the end result is pretty sassy, hey?
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Title via: The incomparable (I think my heart beats faster just thinking about her) Idina Menzel who originated the role of Maureen in RENT on Broadway in 1996 and reprised it nearly ten years later in the film version of RENT. The audience’s first sight of her is when she does her fairly astonishing ‘performance art’ piece, Over The Moon, which the title of this post quotes. I kindly but firmly direct you to consult both the original Broadway and film version.
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Music lately:

Voom, King Kong – apparently this song only came out in 2006 but you hear it and get this feeling like you swear you were listening to it when you were 12. (Depending on where ’12’ was for you). This song (like Ash’s Burn Baby Burn) is made of so many hooks that a more cautious band might have made a whole album from the material crammed into King Kong’s 3-ish minutes. It is fantastic stuff. We managed to see them on Saturday night at Mighty Mighty, so much fun although we missed half their set (including Beth, sniffle) because we were at another gig at Bodega, for Amnesty, where we saw the outstandingly awesome local band Nudge who, for a three-piece, churned out the kind of sound that you’d expect from twelve people.

Dead Prez, Hip Hop…love the beat, the chant-along chorus, and how they tip their hat to Trenchtown Rock. I was working at Big Day Out when they came to New Zealand this year but managed to catch the tail end of their set on my shaved ice break. Even from where I was at the back of the field with a tired brain, a mouthful of syrup, and minutes to go before they left the stage, they were pretty electrifying.

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Next time: 99% sure it will involve tofu.

it’s that orange blossom special

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I try to keep things relatively practical and user-friendly on here, but every now and then a recipe comes along which, even though I can’t really work out what I’d do with it, sounds so pretty that I just go ahead and make it anyway. Like them marshmallows. Really, if I want to cook something badly it’s pretty easy come up with some kind of justification, however dubious.

I found this recipe for Orange and Saffron Confit in the latest Dish magazine. I always thought confit was something submerged in fat for purposes of preservation and deliciousness, but this is basically slices of orange simmered in syrup. I guess it’s for the best, although you know I wouldn’t turn my back on orange slices in a jar of melted butter. It sounded like so much fun, and even though I didn’t really have any need for it in my life I really wanted to try it.

It’s pretty cheap to make, and even if you never, ever use them, the jar looks unbelievably pretty with its tangerine-bright layers of orange spooning in their glossy liquid.

Saffron is admittedly really expensive, and the reason I’m relaxed about using it is because I’ve received it as a Christmas or birthday present so many times (I looooove getting food as presents FYI) that I’ve got plenty I can use. If you don’t have saffron to hand I reckon this would be amazing with a vanilla pod or a couple of cinnamon sticks (for a very cheap option) as a replacement.

Orange and Saffron Confit

From Dish Magazine (the current one with the pumpkin on the cover)

  • 2 large seedless oranges (I used 3)
  • 3 1/2 cups water (just under a litre)
  • Pinch of saffron threads, or whatever substitution you’re using
  • 2 1/2 cups caster sugar (I used regular)

Trim the ends off the oranges. Cut into 1/2 cm thick slices and place in a wide saucepan with the water and saffron threads. Bring to just below boiling point, let it simmer away gently for about 20 minutes. Then sprinkle over your sugar and continue to cook gently for about 30 minutes, until the liquid has reduced a bit. Occasionally you could spoon some of the liquid over the oranges but don’t try stirring them or they’ll fall apart.

Let them cool in their syrup, then carefully transfer the slices to a clean jar or two and pour over the remaining syrup.

Warning: You and your benchtop will get covered in sugary syrup. There is no way of avoiding this. This is what I’ve learned in my travels around the kitchen, anyway.

It smells so good while it’s simmering away, and for very little effort you end up with soft, gleaming slices of intensely flavoured orange and a gorgeously golden syrup flecked with red saffron strands and fragrant with that grassy, saffron-y perfume.

In case you’re thinking “yeah nice, but now what?”, well apart from loudly admiring your handicraft whenever someone walks past, Dish suggests a few options for using this confit. These include decorating cakes, accompanying chocolate mousse, or serving over ice cream. For a while there I was thinking it would be fun to give someone you were only pretending to like a jar of this as a present, so you could imagine them fumbling round trying to (a) come up with a use for it and (b) act like they’re sophisticated and orange confit is something they understand and deal with on a daily basis. However there’s actually plenty of uses for this stuff. Today I decided to chop up a few slices to use in a fruit cake of Nigella Lawson’s – but this cake is amazing on its own so don’t feel that the first recipe here has to happen before you can do the following one.

And if you can’t be bothered making the orange slices to go with this, take comfort in the fact that even though they look pretty, they make slicing the loaf a total pain.

Fruit Tea Loaf

From Nigella Lawson’s very amazing Feast

  • 1 x 250ml cup black tea
  • 375g dried fruit (I used half dates, half sultanas)
  • 125g brown sugar
  • 250g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • pinch ground cloves (I used cinnamon)
  • 1 egg
  • Optional: 3 slices of orange from the above confit recipe, roughly diced, plus extra slices for decorating.

Make the cup of black tea (I used English Breakfast) and pour it into a bowl with the dried fruit and sugar, stir well, then leave sitting overnight. I know, I’ve just told you that you can’t have this cake until tomorrow. If you’ve got a microwave, you can try blasting it in there for a little bit to speed up the absorption process, letting the fruit cool a little before doing the rest of the recipe.

Set your oven to 170 C, and line a loaf tin with baking paper. Beat the rest of the ingredients into the dried fruit (retaining the liquid) and then spoon the mixture into the loaf tin. Bake for around an hour or so. If you’ve got some orange confit kicking round, drape a few slices over the cake and spoon over a little syrup.

  

I can’t even emphasise with words (only by gesturing wildly with my hands) how easy and delicious this cake is. If you haven’t got much in the bank for baking fancy things, this is the cake for you – dried fruit like sultanas, dates and apricots are always cheap. There’s no butter in it and only one egg. But it comes out of the oven tasting like one of those special Christmas cakes which have had days of effort and paychecks going into them. It’s really moist and fruity and rich, and the orange slices lend a sunny zestiness. For all that people get up in arms about Nigella’s recipes which have lots of expensive ingredients in them, if you take the time to properly read her books there’s a complete goldmine of practical, cheap things to fill your stomach with. And come to think of it, this cake would make a genuinely lovely gift to someone, at any time of year.

I really hadn’t thought about what I’d do with the slices of orange as I start cutting into the loaf. Guess I’ll just have to try hacking them up as I go? Or maybe I could push them further and further back as I slice more off the loaf…but it looks pretty. Speaking of pretty, I am a bit in love with that plate of ours which (you can’t see because there’s a slice of cake on it) has a guy and a girl earnestly playing tennis. Picked it up for a dollar from an op shop in town. The joy I feel whenever I see it is dampened a bit by how old it makes me feel that I get worked up about really ugly plates.

Last night Tim and I went to an evening of Rogers and Hammerstein with the always-awesome NZ Symphony Orchestra and West End conductor Martin Yates, with songs performed by West End soloists Jacqui Scott and Andrew Halliday. It was a fantastic evening – Tim and I probably lowered the average age of punters by about forty years – but I will point out that the Michael Fowler centre is awful, with its semi-circular seating arrangement meaning that 40% of the audience can’t see a thing, and for the price they were making people pay, you’d think Kerry Ellis or even Elaine Paige herself were going to be there.

The NZSO were in good form, providing a lush, expansive amble through some of Rogers and Hammersteins best-loved musicals, and songs like Shall We Dance, Some Enchanted Evening, Oklahoma, Climb Every Mountain, and Soliloquy were performed through the evening. The two singers were fantastic – Halliday had a rich and smooth Gavin Creel-esque sound and Scott was blessed with a powerful soprano voice. Gotta say even as a hardcore musical theatre person the Oklahoma can sometimes be a bit much for me – all that talk of how “birds and frogs’ll sing altogether and the frogs’ll hop”. The darkness of Carousel is more my scene, and to their credit, without any costumes or scenery and only marginal context, the two singers were great at switching characters between songs. If anyone’s listening, an evening of Sondheim would be seriously awesome. I probably wouldn’t even complain about the price of seats.

Title via: Johnny Cash, who sung Orange Blossom Special at Folsom Prison and San Quentin prisons. There is some incredibly good footage on Youtube of him performing, if you’re ever sitting round wondering what to do with your time you could definitely do worse than entering his name into the search bar.

Music lately:

King Kapisi feat Mint Chicks, Superhuman – a seriously meaty collaboration between two of Aotearoa’s finest acts. I’ve been lucky enough to see both of them live (Mint Chicks at SFBH in 2006 and earlier this year, and King Kapisi at Pasifika Festival at Western Springs in 2000 or 2001, my memory fails me – anyone else remember?), hopefully there’s the opportunity for people to see them perform this song together at some stage.

Speaking of collaborations, still loving Nas and Damian ‘Jr Gong’ Marley’s diamond of an album, Distant Relatives. Truly. Find it.

Next time: I made Nigella’s Coca Cola chocolate cake today…will be blogging about it soon.

 

we’ll start with the seed of an idea

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Truth be told, I love my food blog best of all. But I’m always inspired by other bloggers out there. There are so many great writers, like-minded souls, and awesome recipes to be found. My favourite discoveries are recipes where the overall result doesn’t involve 12 layers of sponge or a tray of eggs or whatever, just something that’s recognisable, but with a sassy combination of flavours to make you think I must make this immediately and I’m so happy the internet exists so I could find this and not even have to pay for it, even. Like this Spiced Sesame Slice from the very cool Wayfaring Chocolate blog. It’s basically a cake. But then there’s sesame seeds in it. And on it. Plus ginger and cinnamon. I don’t know about you, but that sort of old-fashioned-plus-sexy-modern combination is pretty alluring. Then again, I get all hepped up over things that other people sneer at (like the music of Jesus Christ Superstar.) I may not be the best yardstick to measure “exciting stuff” by but trust me – this cake is damn good.



(If you’re wondering what the foliage in the background is, on the left is harakeke and on the right is our boutique saffron plantation. If you weren’t wondering at all, I just like calling two bulbs a boutique plantation.)



Spiced Sesame Slice 


Recipe from Wayfaring Chocolate…cheers Hannah!

50g sesame seeds
125g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
2 eggs
140g brown sugar
125g butter, melted

Set your oven to 180 C/375 F and line a rectangular or square cake tin, don’t worry about the size – just one of those usual-sized caketin things, you know? Even if you’ve got nonstick or silicone it would pay to butter it because this stuff sticks quite a bit. Not sure why.

First of all, toast the sesame seeds till they’re good and brown and smelling popcorn-y in a pan. Set aside. Don’t taste them, you’ll burn your tongue. Like me.

Whisk the eggs and sugar till thick and creamy and increased in volume. Pour in the melted butter, and then fold in the dry ingredients and half the sesame seeds. Turn it into the cake tin and sprinkle over the rest of the sesame seeds. Bake for 20 mins until firm-but-springy to the touch. Let it cool for a bit before slicing up.



So delicious. It’s really light-textured, and the buttery nuttiness and the warm spiciness is seriously good. It was so easy to just keep slicing off bits…tidying up edges…eating the broken bit…ah, you know how it goes. We go through bottles of sesame oil – its rich, dark nutty flavour is amazing, and the seeds work really well in a sweeter setting. I didn’t have any allspice (does anyone ever have allspice?) so in a move that I hope Hannah of Wayfaring Chocolate would be proud of (she eats stuff like chilli-studded chocolate and kangaroo meat very casually) I used Ras-el-Hanout spice mix instead. But you could just leave it out, or even add more cinnamon and ginger.



And it’s really, really good with a cup of tea.
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Title via: Untitled Opening Song from [title of show], the musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical. This show is pretty special to me, even though I obviously never got to see it on the Broadway, and I won’t go on about it (although you know I could easily go on about it) but I will say this: don’t anyone let a New Zealand production get made (and I seriously believe it could work) without me playing Susan. I just want to so bad, and I think that’s a good enough reason to make it happen.
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Music lately:

Apart from the sweet writing skills and chocolate-a-plenty and recipes, the other thing I like about Hannah’s blog is that it always makes me think of the song Poor Wayfaring Stranger. We used to sing it in choir at school, which is when I really started to dig its melancholy, old-timey, Americana sound. This version by Dusty Springfield is particularly choice.

Gypsy Eyes from Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland…we just love us some Hendrix. Gypsy Eyes is a very cool song…I like the way he pronounces all the vowels on ‘re-a-lize that I’ve been hypnotised’.

The whole entire Distant Relatives album, from the one-two punch of Nas and Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley… amazing. Purposeful beats, powerful messages, impassioned delivery, but you only have to listen to first track As We Enter for five seconds to know it’s special stuff. I like the titular togetherness of the lyrics as they go back and forth – “My man’ll speak patois, and I can speak rap star…”
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Next time: Butter is so expensive! Hey! Wha’happen? If anyone could make this all go away and get it down nearer to $2 a block I’d be most obliged. Till then, we’re probably looking at some dairy-free times up ahead.

go and part the seas in malibu

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Yikes last week went fast. I most definitely meant to blog sooner but one thing leads to another and all of a sudden it’s a dark Sunday afternoon and I’m pretty convinced it’s time to go to bed but it’s really only just past lunchtime. That’s how you maintain a blog, people! That said, if the week went as quickly for everyone else, then no harm done – we’re all on the same page.

Nothing like rifling through the sepia-d pages of the Edmond’s Cookbook of Mum’s that she gave me to make things feel a little more slow and relaxed. I’ve already made a bunch of crazy marshmallows from this book, but today I felt like something with more practical application to our lives. Not that marshmallows are an unreasonable possession. They have their reasons.


Am I trying to recreate a Frankie magazine photoshoot or what. Except theirs happen on beautiful fabrics and paper and stuff, and mine is on a cheap and grubby teatowel.

I’ve always been a fan of coconut but recently I’ve been really embracing the stuff – I love that it’s so intensely rich and delicious and creamy and fragrant but also very cheap. That said it feels like forever since I’ve had an actual coconut, drank the water from it and bit into the chewy, juicy white flesh (so long ago that I can remember doing it but not where or when or anything…maybe I just dreamed this bit.)

Apparently New Zealanders have loved coconut for generations, although in its most mainstream form it’s really the least appealing – I’m not talking fragrant curries or moist puddings eaten with mangoes or whatever here, I mean the dry, dessicated white flakes that cling to the edges of lamingtons or lolly cake (usually falling off and getting all over everything inbetween being on the plate and getting in your mouth). Nevertheless, as an ingredient dessicated coconut is definitely practical and still gives that definite, beachy flavour, and was recognised as such by several interesting recipes in this pretty old (sorry Mum) Edmonds Cookbook.

Coconut Kisses

These biscuity biscuits are supposed to be stuck together with butter icing…While I’m seriously the last person that would act as a gatekeeper between butter icing and the rest of the world, I liked the idea of having twice as many biscuits around if I left them alone.

110g butter

2 tablespoons hot water
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup flour
3/4 cup coconut
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder (you could do as the good book tells you to and use Edmonds)
Note: I added 1/2 a teaspoon Boyajian orange oil, partly for flavour and partly because it was really expensive and I like to pretend like it’s a useful ingredient to have around, I mean it is and all, but, you know.
Melt butter and hot water together (I sat the bowl on top of a small pot of simmering water), mix in the rest of the ingredients. Roll into balls, put on a baking tray and flatten a little (I forgot!) Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F. You can, of course, stick pairs together with butter icing.

Notice the lovely cake stand, given to me for my birthday by my godmother and family!

They don’t look overly exciting but these coconut kisses are in fact mighty delicious – crisp on the outside but meltingly shortbready within. They’d be perfect dunked in a cup of tea as long as you didn’t drop them – they’re pretty small – and they have echoes of several coconut-flavoured biscuits out there on the market except of course they’re way nicer, and much cheaper to make than buy. You could also try using oil instead of the melted butter – I’m sure it would work, and if so: vegan!

Because one kind of coconut flavoured baked good is just not enough, I also gave the Coconut Cakes a crack. They’re really just small, coconut-enhanced scones, and in fact after eating one, what I really wanted to do was spread them with raspberry jam and sandwich them together with whipped cream.

Coconut Cakes


110g flour
45g butter
30g sugar
60g coconut
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1 teacup milk (I used just under 3/4 cup)

Sift flour, rub in butter, stir in the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix to a stiffish dough with the milk. Edmonds says “place in rocky shapes” on your baking tray, I just dropped rough dessertspoons-ful onto the tray and hoped for the best. Bake 15 minutes at 180 C/375 F.

These are so good – really quick to mix up and incredibly tender and light, not a biscuit and not a cake. The coconut makes them flavourous and textural (yeah they’re words!) and they smell amazing while they’re baking. I think you could definitely get away with buttering these before eating (not that I’m the best yardstick to measure healthy buttering behaviour against) or serve with cream and jam as I mentioned earlier, but they’re great just as they are – soft and delicious.

The New Zealand International Film Festival has rolled into town again, replete with cinematic plenty. On Friday night we saw The Illusionist at the prompting of our former-flatmate-current-friend Ange – it was directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also did Triplets of Belleville. It was beautiful, so beautiful but utterly sad and desolate as well. I definitely recommend it all the same, and don’t feel that subtitled films aren’t for you because in fact there is almost no dialogue whatsoever in this film. Just beauty! I also recommend that afterwards you go somewhere warm and drink French red wine and eat homemade chocolate macaroons, it definitely worked out well for us.
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Title via: okay, all this coconut talk made me think of a certain coconut liqueur, and like all good songs named after an object or a person or something, the very thought of it had me humming Hole’s wonderful 1998 song Malibu and now here we are. Of course, I’ve already outlined my enjoyment of Courtney Love previously here…
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Music lately:
I Heart Nigella by Wellington band Mammal Airlines. Tim and myself interviewed them recently for our website 100s and 1000s (please excuse the insultingly bad quality of the video, we’re getting there, we are…) and the three of them were awesomely nice and fun to talk to. But perhaps most awesomely nice of all is the fact that they have a song called I Heart Nigella, and what’s more, it’s really good. They’ve made both their EPs available for free download, so take advantage of that generosity, hey?
This Song Has No Title from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I know Elton John has an electric boot planted firmly in the middle of the road these days but I have no fear in saying I love this album. The reason it’s on my mind though is because Tim put it on the stereo and managed to trick me into thinking we were listening to War of the Worlds, which I really hate. I was getting pretty aggravated until album opener Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding dropped speed and changed tempo and all of a sudden I realised we were actually listening to Elton John. Now we sound like incredibly unexciting people, but it’s a true story and you heard it here first.
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Next time: I made ceviche for the first time and it was so good! Not so good was my pronunciation. Even though Nigella was all “it’s Mexican!” I’ve been pronouncing it all French-like, “se-veesh”…

don’t dream it’s pavlova

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The New Zealand ‘identity’ has many characteristics to capitalise upon for advertising campaigns – how minimalistic we are as a people, how we generally don’t go into excessive details or facial expressions or go in for fancy things. I found myself thinking about this when I was given the opportunity to submit this blog post as part of a promotion for mega-cook and food hero Rick Stein’s impending visit to Aotearoa. The “ultimate New Zealand dish” was my brief, which is not something I feel authoritative enough to pinpoint down. But a pavlova immediately leapt to mind, and infuriatingly, so did all those ads.

On the one hand, it’s kind of amusing that we have this famous pudding which has appeared in recipe books and graced tables for years and years, but which is seriously a bit of a mission to make. Oh, us kiwis, being all casual about this complicated dessert! On the other hand I was annoyed with myself for buying into it all by having an advertising-fuelled self-deprecating chuckle. On the other hand, it made me wonder whether we are even all that relaxed and simple or whether it’s something advertising has constructed. On the other hand, marketing is hard, trying to get information to people in the spaces between the information they’re actually trying to absorb is a mission and a half, and I can’t help but salute any that winkle their way into everyday vernacular.

On the other hand, pavlova. Let’s not overthink it, eh?

Pavlova – made from egg whites, sugar, and a lot of air – isn’t overly straightforward, but if you’re careful and patient, it’s really no big deal. But importantly, it always looks like a big deal. Pavlova is one of those dishes over which arguments are dribbled back and forth between New Zealand and Australia about who thought it up originally. Fortunately the pavlova is unlikely to engage in the kind of reputation-smearing scandalous activity that prompts a flurry of “Australia can have him” responses from the public. While I’d like to think it’s ours, because I love ballet so much and it was named after the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose ethereal white tutu it supposedly represented, I’m not overly fussed. If Australia really does have claim to the first pav, so be it – I’m more charmed with the idea of dishes being created in honour of people at all. Maybe one day there will be a “Heavily Buttered Toast with Marmite and Melted Cheese, Microwaved a la Laura” in the same way that you get Peach Melba and stuff like that.

With all this in mind, I’ve adapted a Nigella Lawson recipe for my take on pavlova. Yes, Nigella Lawson the British non-New Zealander. If you want a plain pavlova recipe I’m sure you couldn’t do better than anything in the Edmonds cookbook or any other reliable local cookbook. My take on Nigella’s version of our usual, marshmallow-white creation is a darker, and (dare I say it in the same breath as the wholesome Edmonds cookbook) altogether sexier pavlova. Aren’t we always asking people, wide-eyed and hopeful, about what they think about New Zealand? Isn’t it a compliment to us that the mighty Nigella has so many pavlova recipes? Yes, our usual pavlova is covered in a thick layer of whipped cream and maybe a few slices of kiwifruit or spoonfuls of passionfruit seeds. These are both incredibly good options and my version – Chocolate, Tamarillo, and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream – is just another option, rather than any kind of attempt to kick the original white pav.

Chocolate, Tamarillo and Pistachio Pavlova with Coconut Cream

Based on the Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova (also excellent!) from Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.
6 egg whites
300g caster sugar
50g good cocoa (I use Fair Trade or Equagold)
1 tsp balsamic or red wine vinegar

6 tamarillos
2 tablespoons brown sugar
150g dark chocolate (I used Whittakers – made in Wellington!)
100g shelled pistachios
1 can coconut cream

Set oven to 180 C. Whip up the egg whites till satiny peaks form, then continue to beat them while adding the sugar a tiny bit at a time. Maybe get a buddy to help with this bit. Once the sugar is all added the mixture should be thick, shiny and stiff. Sift in the cocoa and sprinkle over the vinegar, folding in carefully. Spread mixture into a 23cm circle on a baking paper lined tray. Immediately turn down oven to 150 C and leave for about an hour. Once done, turn oven off and leave pav to cool completely.

While the pav is baking, scoop out the seeds and flesh of the tamarillo, tip into a small bowl and sprinkle over the brown sugar, allowing it to dissolve. Swipe a sharp knife through the flesh if the seeds aren’t loose enough – you want a loose, chunky mixture as opposed to large, separate pieces. I hope that makes sense. Melt the dark chocolate and drizzle spoonfuls generously, Jackson Pollock-styles across the pav. You don’t have to use the whole lot, but don’t let me hold you back. Spoon the tamarillo seeds, flesh and juice evenly over the top and finally sprinkle thickly with pistachios. Serve in wedges with a spoonful of coconut cream on the side.

Serves 6 or so.
Something I should probably point out is that I completely forgot to turn on the oven before making this, so the beaten egg whites sat around for a considerable amount of time before getting any kind of blast of heat. This, plus the fact that I made this using a whisk instead of any kind of electric equipment, may explain the overwhelming flatness of the finished product. Still, 6 egg whites were not going to be used in vain, and with a certain pioneering spirit (and very sore upper arms from whisking the egg whites) I carried on. I’d sent a txt to our good friend and ex-flatmate Ange, saying that for reasons too complex to explain in 160 characters I had to make a pav and would she like to help us eat it? Luckily she did, or I might have eaten the whole enormous flat mess while curled up on the floor – what pavlova? I never made a pavlova!

I really did this whole thing on the fly – running round Moore Wilson’s and looking at what was in season without a clear picture of what I wanted the end result to be apart from “damn amazing”. For a few dire moments it looked like the pavlova would have to be topped with mashed swede or something until Tim pointed out the tamarillos, dark red and rounded fruit encasing sharp, juicy flesh and seeds. My mind began to move remarkably fast, and I mentally paired the fruit with dark Whittakers chocolate and maybe some kind of nut for interest’s sake. Pistachios, green and gorgeous, presented themselves once I got to the baking goods shelf and all of a sudden it started to make sense.

This pavlova replaces the dairy of our robust industry for a large spoonful of coconut cream. It’s a nod to our place in the Pacific and also makes it accessible to those who can’t actually eat dairy. Between the hastily assembled concept, forgetting to turn the oven on, the fact that the kitchen and myself were starting to be covered in chocolate, and the visitors turning up to eat it, I was starting to get a bit nervous about how it would actually taste after all that.

Friends – fellow New Zealanders – it was flipping excellent. What the pavlova lacked in, shall we say, body, it made up for in fudgy cocoa-y depth, with that familiarly crisp surface which dissolved alluringly on the tongue. The tamarillos were juicily sharp and fragrant, contrasting with the dark, rich cocoa taste of the melted Whittakers chocolate, the soft, buttery pistachios, and the mellow coconut cream seeping into each slice. We ate slice after slice (once I’d taken an excessively long time photographing it, of course) and then my flatmate and his friends came home and they had some too. Then Ange’s boyfriend came over and ate some. It was a big pavlova but its lifespan was barely hours.

Is this New Zealand’s ultimate dish? Oh, who could say. Put it next to a roast lamb or a fresh crayfish and it might seem far too fussy and “not us” and downright excessive. It is, however, an example of what you can do with one of our best dishes. It’s a new take on a gorgeous original. Yes, we may be told repeatedly that we are short on emotion and expression but don’t let this hold you back from enjoying something magically delicious, Aotearoa.

For more info on Rick Stein’s New Zealand tour, give this site a look.

Two very cool things happened this week. One: I met Ray McVinnie. RAY MCVINNIE! Some know him as a judge on NZ Masterchef but I’ve been reading his Quick Smart column in Cuisine magazine hard for years and years now. Yes, he’s more of a niche celebrity than a complete household name but he’s easily my favourite NZ foodwriter and every single one of his columns is a diamond. If you don’t know who he is, try to think of your favourite local celebrity who seems accessible enough in status but also roughly the awesomest in their chosen field, and imagine you got to meet them. McVinnie was at the recent Visa Wellington on a Plate launch that I was lucky enough to attend and along with two other Wellington food bloggers at the event, I just kind of prodded him on the shoulder, and said “hello, I’m Laura, I’m a food blogger, I’m a really big fan of your writing.” We all introduced ourselves and even got a brief conversation out of him – “Keep writing about food,” he said (oh how I will!) and also he said something about food being the glue that holds society together, I can’t remember specifically what it was but I remember agreeing with it. No lie, I grinned all the way home (sorry to any passers-by), got in the door and did a high-kick of happiness. By the way, the Visa Wellington on a Plate sounds well exciting, all those set lunch menus at all the fancy restaurants is making me happy just thinking about it. For more info check out their website!

Then on Saturday, I had a seriously cool lunch at Duke Carvell’s with a whole bunch of Wellington-based food bloggers, including the aforementioned ladies of Gusty Gourmet who I met Ray McVinnie with. (Ray McVinnie! Okay I’ll stop talking about it now.) Everyone was super lovely, and just plain super, really, and it was fun learning about peoples’ stories and what made them start writing, and who the person is behind the blog name. It was a good feeling, being amongst other people who love food and love writing about it, and who all live in Wellington. Blogger solidarity!
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Title via: Crowded House…maybe I should feel slightly apologetic about this one, oh sure it’s a sharp-inward-drawing-of-breath-through-clenched-teeth-edly bad pun, but the way those opening chords teeter as if being plucked on the strings of a fully functioning heart instead of a guitar…I’m really not sorry at all.
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Music lately:

New Edition’s Something About You, from their 1996 reunion album Home Again. Those moves! It has been years and years since I’ve heard this song but I saw a tweet on Twitter mentioning 90s music and instantly thought of this. I used to love it and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not really keeping an ear to the R’n’B ground these days but it feels like they don’t make ’em like this anymore. (Poetically, fishpond.co.nz offers this album on cassette, before informing you that it’s “currently unavailable”…no kidding.)

Meadowlark, a song from the musical The Baker’s Wife, sung by Liz Callaway. I’m a bit obsessed with Liz Callaway at the moment, I’ve enjoyed her singing for a while but recently it’s hit me just how intensely amazing she is. In a joyful coincidence, one of the songs she’s most famous for is something I’m also obsessed with right now. I’ll be trying to articulate this better on 100s and 1000s soon…
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Next time: It has been real pie-making weather out there lately…I have pie on the brain. When it’s this cold all I really want to do is read Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and then cook everything from it.

here comes the brand new flava in your ear

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While I’m usually as inspired by Cuisine magazine and its contents as the next person, the July issue that arrived in the mailbox a few days ago seemed to make me want to cook even more than I usually do. Be aware: this is some high-level longing. Inside its pages is an interview with Yotam Ottolenghi, who, apart from having an extremely cool name, has developed a small empire of eateries in the UK (the name Ottolenghi is really built to carry an empire, I’m not sure mine is) and penned a cookbook here and there too. He has a new one out called Plenty, of which a sampling of recipes were featured in Cuisine. From this one alone I think I would, at the very least, go make puppy-dog eyes at Plenty in a bookshop and stroke its elegant cover thoughtfully. (Hello, at $70 – sure, it’s probably worth actually buying, but at this stage the only headway I can afford is to make significant eye contact with it.)

The thing that attracted me to this recipe was not just that I magically had all the ingredients – (except the green chilli but I made up for this by adding a daring spoonful of chilli paste to the sauce; I substituted kumara for butternut because that’s what I had) – but that the combination of flavours seemed so new and yet so obviously meant to be together. I’d never had cardamom like this before or poured tahini over kumara. I wanted to try it, and immediately.

Roasted Kumara with Lime, Yoghurt Tahini Sauce and Chilli

Adapted from a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi from his book Plenty, in the July Cuisine magazine.

2 whole limes
4 Tablespoons olive oil1 large kumara, or enough to make about 900g (or of course, butternut)2 tablespoons cardamom pods
1 teaspoon ground allspice100g plain, Greek-style yoghurt
30g tahini
1 green chilli, thinly slicedcoriander leaves
Sea salt
Preheat oven to 210 C. Trim the tops and tails off the limes, stand on a chopping board and carefully slice off the peel and pith (a bit like this recipe here). Quarter the limes from top to bottom, and cut each quarter into thiin slices (basically – you want really thin slices of lime. The instructions are a little fiddly.) Place the slices in a small bowl, sprinkle with a little sea salt and pour over one tablespoon of the olive oil. If you have a really, really nice olive oil this is the place to use it.

Cut the butternut or kumara into slices about 1cm thick. Lay them on a baking tray. Grind the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar (or you could probably use a food processor or something) so the seeds are extracted, and then discard the greenish pods (this took forever! The recipe does not mention this fact!) and continue to work them into a rough powder. Add the allspice and remaining oil (I used only about a tablespoon or so) and brush over the slices, sprinkle with a little salt and place in the oven for 15 minutes or until tender. Remove from the oven.
Meanwhile, whisk together the yoghurt, tahini, a tablespoon of lime juice squeezed from one of the slices chopped earlier, 2 tablespoons of water and a pinch of sea salt. To serve, arrange the slightly cooled slices of butternut or kumara on a plate, drizzle with the yoghurt sauce, spoon over the lime slices and scatter the coriander and chilli over the top.

These flavours together were so stunning. After one mouthful I involuntarily cried “Damn this is good!” and defied anyone within my empire (Tim) not to agree with me. Luckily he liked it too.

Here’s what this plate is serving you: the soft, satiny, caramelised slices of sweet kumara, roasted with lemony, tongue-numbing cardamom and cooled with earthy, nutty, tangy yoghurt and tahini sauce. The wince-inducing sharpness of the limes is somehow softened during their brief olive oil and salt spa session, leaving only pure, juicy lime flavour. You know what perky lift the coriander brings, that’s why it’s so popular. The chilli that I added into the sauce brought a little necessary dark heat. We had this with rice and it was a small but perfect dinner for two. You could leave out the yoghurt and make this completely vegan or serve it alongside a gingery roasted chicken or sesame and soy-marinated steak. It’s something special all right. So special I wheeled out alllllll those adjectives.

Speaking of adjectives…

On Monday Tim and I were fortunate enough to see Wanda Jackson performing live at the San Francisco Bath House. At 75 years of age her voice is as menacing as it ever was and she put on an amazing show, revisiting old favourites (Let’s Have A Party – hooo!) and new zingers, with stories of how she got to be where she is. Afterwards she appeared on the floor and waited patiently to sign photos for everyone, Tim and myself included – we got squeezed to the back by some understandably, but undeniably pushy folk so she looked a little dazed by the time our turn rolled round, but was still friendly. She’s often mentioned in conjunction with dating Elvis and for Jack White producing her next album but far from being defined by the men in her life she appeared on stage as who she is – an incredibly talented, powerful, gracious woman.

In my last post I mentioned the All Whites’ exciting trajectory in the FIFA World Cup – Tim and I got up and trudged to the pub in the freezing cold at 2am Thursday night to witness their final game of the tournament against Paraguay. While they didn’t win they definitely didn’t lose either – they remain one of the few unbeaten teams of the whole shebang and truly, when you compare the amount of times that Paraguay could have scored, but didn’t, and our few chances at a goal, it was a fairly astonishing game. ___________________________________________________

Title via: Craig Mack’s superfine Flava In Ya Ear from Project: Funk Da World.
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Music lately:

Wanda Jackson’s devastatingly good Shakin’ All Over, produced by Jack White for Third Man Records. On Monday night Jackson was wearing this white, heavily fringed sweatshirt (it reminded me a little of a pink sweater I used to have as a kid with a giant purple fringed V-shape across the front, I called it my “Barbie Goes West” outfit because I was cool like that) which she used to great effect in performing this song. I love it!

Devo’s new-ish song Fresh from their album Something For Everybody. I do love a song that exercises its right to multiple tempos and both Fresh and Shakin’ All Over do this staggeringly well.
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Next time: I did promise pavlova and it is on its way, but I also made some seriously enticing homespun marshmallows today and they might well jump the queue. In other news Tim and I have embarked on a side-project together, a little site largely devoted to music called 100s and 1000s, check it out if you’d like to…

big cheese, make me

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I’m still pretty excited/jittery about being nominated for CLEO magazine/Palmolive Wonder Woman (excited/jittery for reasons outlined here.) If you’d like to help out someone who’s not likely to win but wants to win heaps, kindly email cleo@acpmagazines.co.nz with WONDER WOMAN in the subject line and “voting for Blogger: Laura Vincent (hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com)” in the body of the email. If you want. I’ve been pretty humbled by all the niceness that has poured forth from people already, considering there’s no real benefit to anyone but myself (and Tim, for what it’s worth) if I get anywhere in this. Much love and appreciation to everyone that has voted for me.

FYI, I’m watching the Tony Awards while I’m typing this. CBS isn’t streaming outside of the USA so I’ve got this pixelated postage-stamp sized square of live feed that I found with some judicious searching through Twitter. In 2010, that just feels wrong. Live streams should be for everyone! Nevertheless it’s still very exciting. If things get a little bit “Cream the butter and sugar till fluffy ANGELALANSBURYILOVEYOU and then add the eggs ITHINKISAWIDINAMENZEL one by one” well, you’ve been warned. That said, Broadway and food blogging already co-exist most harmoniously here, so with any luck you probably won’t even notice.
So, I found this recipe for homemade ricotta cheese. It’s eyebrow-raisingly simple and after making it once you’ll be so enthralled with the deliciousness of the results, that you may consider throwing in the job to become svengali of your own small-time cheese conglomerate.
Homemade Ricotta Cheese

With thanks to Bell’Alimento for the recipe.

2 litres (8 cups) blue-top/whole milk (I used organic milk even, yusss)
250 mls cream (it comes in 300 ml bottles here, so I just threw the lot in)
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice.

Get a colander and line it with muslin, cheesecloth or plain cotton (I went out and bought a big, undyed cotton serviette) OR, if you have it, a big coffee filter. Sit the colander over a large deep bowl and set aside.

Pour the milk, cream and salt into a big stockpot (seriously, use a big pot – it rises up a bit) and bring to the boil, stirring all the time. When it’s at a good solid boil – don’t be afraid to just let it bubble away, I know it looks freaky! – add the lemon or lime juice. Reduce the heat, and continue to stir while the mixture separates into curds and liquid. I continued stirring over a low heat for about a minute after adding the juice.

Carefully, carefully (with a buddy if you’re clumsy like me) pour the whole contents of the pan into the cloth-lined colander. The liquid will flow through to the bowl underneath, leaving soft, white ricotta cheese in the colander. Allow this to drain for at least an hour then transfer to the refrigerator. As soon as it’s properly cold, you can start eating it.

You should end up with about 500g of pure, fresh ricotta cheese. And how! It emerges from its cloth wrapping like a surmountable mountain of dairy joy, the only incline I’d be inclined to climb (long story short: I had a school camp once where we had to hike, and plough through plantations of cutty grass and so on – never again! Cheese mountains only for me from now on thanks.) It’s tender, incredibly creamy but with a lemony lightness that makes you want to just eat it by the fistful.
While I have a lot of time for cheese, we never really eat all that much of it, because it’s so expensive. Which is understandable – companies need to make money, and small, artisinal, niche products use a lot of dollars. You should totally support the companies who make the food you love, but now and then it’s superfun to support yourself and get a giant pile of beautiful cheese for about $5. It’s at its best eaten within around 48 hours but that’s probably the one kind of pressure-filled environment I could thrive in.
A goodly wedge of the cheese went into these gorgeous Ricotta and Polenta Hotcakes from Cuisine magazine. The recipe is can be found here (I didn’t make the syrup, by the way) They’re straightforward enough to make but still a bit of effort – if you’re looking for something more storecupboardy, that you can throw in a blender and make with your eyes closed then try Nigella’s recipe instead. They were a completely delicious start to the day – the toothsome grit of the cornmeal with the warm chunks of ricotta bound in a soft, crisp pancake spiced with cinnamon and orange.
So, the Tony Awards. Watching them via some non-authorised stream is frustrating, CBS, but it still feels exciting to be watching it at the same time as everyone else. In 12-second increments.
You don’t freeze up and start loading when Idina Menzel’s on. Learn from this.
I’m really not much of a Tony commentator because I’ve never been to New York to see any of these musicals or plays, and generally the only coverage I get is whatever goes on Youtube. I enjoyed Sean Hayes (star of Promises, Promises on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth, or you may know him as Will & Grace’s Jack) as host, and there were some wonderful moments of theatre, but it does feel this year that they’re being really heavy-handed with the Hollywood celebrity presence (and the fact that Glee’s Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele were performing – they were on Broadway first, you know!) but what ya gonna do – they’re bankable.
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Title via: Nirvana’s Big Cheese from 1989’s Bleach. I just plain love Nirvana, and this is an excellent yet relatively underexposed example of their sinister sound.
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Music lately:
Lunatic Fringe by Auckland’s Drab Doo-Riffs. We caught them headlining at Mighty Mighty the other morning (ie, their set started around 1am) and they were a ton of fun. It’s a scrappy mix of surf, punk, rock, probably some other stuff, and as I’m a sucker for surf-rock drums they suit me just fine. The two frontpeople Karl Stevens and Caiomhe Macfehin kept things moving at a cracking pace, and were both incredibly entertaining to watch. I’m sure they’ll continue to do well, a) because girls can dance to it in that hunched-shoulder, foot-stampy way (hey, I was doing it too) b) their live sets are many and excellent and c) it’s such good-time music.
Sherie Rene Scott’s beautiful interpretation of Ricky Lee Jones’ Rainbow Sleeves from her semi-autobiographical musical Everyday Rapture. I’ve never even seen Sherie Rene Scott live so what do I know but I was a bit sad to see she didn’t win the Tony (Catherine Zeta Jones did, FYI…)
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Next time: Mum sent me a giant parcel of giant, fragrant green limes which is very exciting as limes tend to also be really expensive. I was going to say that unlike ricotta cheese, there’s no way of making your own limes, but then I remembered you can, you know, plant a lime tree. Sometimes I worry myself. Anyway, I’m looking forward to sussing out lots of recipes.

we sell our souls for bread

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Nothing like a persistently rainy long weekend to really push me back into the grippy arms of the kitchen. I seriously love making bread, but haven’t had a chance in ages so tip of the hat to the Queen for her birthday creating a Monday off this week. If New Zealand ever becomes a republic there’d better be some particularly concrete replacements for any long weekend we’d lose as a result. With extra time on my hands I’ve been making all kinds of things including this Nigella Lawson bread recipe from her flawless book of baking, How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

I was able to use these beautiful walnuts that Mum posted down to me from a family friend’s tree. They’re easy enough to get into, just a light tap from a hammer on the shell and a bit of digging quickly produces a pile of bamboo coloured, wrinkled heart shapes. They were soft and fragrant and tasted amazing – none of that tooth-coating bitterness that you sometimes get with those from a packet which have been sitting round too long.

This bread is fiddly-ish but no real mission to make. I didn’t have any of the wholemeal bread flour that Nigella specified but I did have plenty of half-empty packets of dusty offerings from the health food shop down the road (I don’t know, they’re just so compulsively purchasable) so if you’re in the same boat just do what I did and use 550g white bread flour and make up the rest of the weight with bran, rolled oats, that sort of thing. If you don’t have real maple syrup, use honey or golden syrup instead.


Maple Walnut Bread

Adapted from Maple-Pecan Bread in Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess (ie you can use pecans if you have them)
  • 500g wholemeal bread flour
  • 150g white bread flour
  • 1 sachet instant dry yeast
  • 300-400mls warm water
  • 4 tablespoons maple syrup
  • 50-100g walnuts
  • Walnut oil (if you have it, otherwise use plain eg rice bran)
Mix the flours and yeast together in a large bowl. Pour in the water and syrup and mix to make a sticky dough. Knead for a couple of minutes, then let it sit for 20 minutes. Knead again, sprinkling over the walnuts as you go. It will take a little while to incorporate them, simply because this type of dough is a little tougher than usual. Keep pushing and kneading until the walnuts are more or less dispersed throughout the dough and until it forms a smooth, elastic ball. Pour over a good tablespoon of walnut or other oil, and turn so all surfaces are covered. Cover in clingfilm, and leave for a couple of hours to rise.

At this stage, punch it down to deflate it, then knead it into a loaf shape. Cover with a teatowel and leave it for half an hour, meanwhile setting the oven to 220 C. Bake for 1/4 of an hour before turning down the temperature to 180C and baking for a further 20 or so minutes, covering with a sheet of tinfoil if it starts to get too brown.


The maple syrup isn’t aggressively present in the finished, baked bread, but gives a subtle, layered fragrance and sweet, chewy crust which goes brilliantly with the deliciously toasted walnuts. Last night for dinner, inspired by a Ray McVinnie Quick Smart column in one of my Cuisine magazines, I cooked chunks of butternut pumpkin in boiling water till soft, drained and mashed them with coriander and cumin seeds, fried squares of diced streaky bacon and wafers of haloumi till sizzling, and served all that on top of slices of the freshly baked bread. The sweetness of the pumpkin was echoed in the sweetness of the bread, incredibly good with the contrastingly salty bacon and cheese. Unfortunately that’s the last of the cut-price haloumi I got from The Food Show so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to recreate such a smashing dinner for a while. If however you yourself are in the regular-haloumi-buying demographic then by all means try it.

Other things that happened this mighty fine long weekend include forsaking a long-time-coming sleepin to stagger to the pub to watch the All Whites’ friendly pre-FIFA World Cup game against Slovenia on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we lost, but full marks to Slovenia considering their population is only 2.2 million or so. The upshot of it was that we had a great excuse to go to Customs and order great quantities of beautiful, beautiful filter coffee served by the lovely people there. We don’t get to go very often but they even recognised that Tim had got his hair cut. As well as making me want to cook things, the rain also meant we had a fine excuse to watch The IT Crowd last night. Britain seems to positively fling out these small, side-poppingly funny yet under-the-radar comedies, and while I’d known about The IT Crowd for a while I’ve never pinned it down for a good watch. I really enjoyed Richard Ayoade’s work withThe Mighty Boosh so it’s nice to see him in a leading role in this. Find it if you can – we finished the lot in very quick succession.

Speaking of coffee, and in exciting news for future employers, Tim has left Starbucks after three years. No hard feelings towards the green siren – it helped pay our rent through university and is highly educative coffee-wise. If anyone out there requires a ridiculously great guy with an Honours degree in media studies to do cool stuff like using skills learned in both university and life, then truly look no further than the now-available Tim. You think I deal recommendations lightly? Think again.
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Title via: Electric Blues from the Broadway musical Hair. My preoccupation with its amazing score rides again. This song is so exciting and dynamic, and I presume they use the word ‘bread’ to mean ‘money’ in this context, but then…maybe they’d tried this recipe too. And while lyrics like “we’re all encased in sonic armour, belting out through chrome grenades” make me smile, the next stanza’s “they chain ya and they brainwash ya, when you least expect it, they feed ya mass media” could definitely find relevance at any stage.
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Music lately:
Beth, by localers Voom from their debut album Now I Am Me. I first heard this song years ago on Channel Z and while I can’t say I cried or anything, I certainly felt that good, self-indulgent kind of desolation that you get from wallowing in excellent sad music about situations that you’re not sure if you can relate to but you allow them to reflect whatever it is you’re feeling anyway. Some bright spark put the video onto Youtube so I can now enjoy and wallow all over again as and when necessary.
Janelle Monae’s Tightrope from The Archandroid. There’s already so much being said about her on – dun dun – the internet, but at face value it’s a stonkeringly good tune.
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Next time: Maybe even more exciting than baking bread and watching DVDs on a Friday night, I made my own ricotta cheese yesterday! The recipe is so easy I could almost put it right here as an afterthought. But no. You’ll have to wait for next time, well either that or call my bluff and google “homemade ricotta” and render me completely unnecessary.

looking through a glass onion

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It is so, so freezing in Wellington lately, that straight-through-your-clothes harsh chill which makes getting out of bed in the morning that much more aggrieving. I was in Christchurch and Dunedin over the weekend for work which was also an intensely cold experience, not to mention pretty exhausting (can’t say I’ve been sleeping well recently, and sitting in clenched frustration for an hour and a half on a plastic chair in the Dunedin airport where there is nothing to do while waiting for your flight, followed by a further hour and a half’s wait at the Christchurch airport will take it out of you. This is New Zealand, not the mighty plains of Canada, I don’t see why we need flights with stop-overs.) Hence why it has been a while since I’ve blogged.

There’s not much I love doing more in winter than sitting by a roaring heater with a pile of my cookbooks, going through and imagining what shenanigans I could get up to. Cooking in winter is fun – all those long-simmered warming dishes that make the house smell amazing and warm you as you stand over them – unlike the summer heat when all you really want to do for dinner is sit quietly inside the freezer and lick its icy walls. One book that I had a flick through recently was the Supercooks Supersavers Cookbook, which I picked up at the local opshop back home for about a dollar a few years back. I love its season-based chapters, its 1980 style, and its seriously enthusiastic title.
I found this awesome sounding recipe for Onions Smothered with Walnuts. It’s basically onions roasted in a sticky, spicy sauce, and though they’re more “vaguely scattered” than “smothered” with the walnuts it’s a gorgeous combination of flavours.
Onions Smothered with Walnuts
From the Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook

450g small pickling (pearl) onions, peeled (I didn’t have any, so just used whole onions, quartered)
75g walnuts, chopped
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
1/2 cup stock or water
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oven to 170 C. In a bowl, mix everything together and pour into an oven-proof dish. Cover with tinfoil, and bake for around an hour, stirring once or twice. *Use olive oil and balsamic vinegar instead of the butter and worcestershire sauce to easily make this vegan. Yay!
It’s so good that I actually made it two nights in a row. In a weird twist of events, the first night I made it in a silicon dish and the second night I made it in a metal dish, and the second night the onions and sauce turned all black. Made me a little nervous, but not so nervous that I didn’t carry on eating the lot. This recipe has a lot going for it – it has punchy, warm flavours, it’s very cheap to make, it’s versatile, and it just cooks away by itself, not really requiring any attention. The honey, chilli and cinnamon are a brilliant combination and it’s perfect over pasta, which is how I had it, but would also work on couscous, mashed potatoes, rice, or stirred into a stew or roasted vegetables. Thanks, Supercook’s Supersavers Cookbook!
As I said, I’m pretty weary from the weekend, I haven’t been sleeping so well and on top of that I actually wasn’t feeling that great over the weekend. There were some diverting moments – seeing Graeme Downes of The Verlaines, The Dead C’s Bruce Russell and Flying Nun’s Roger Shepherd weighing in on a discussion panel about NZ Music, subsequently sitting behind the Verlaines on the flight to Dunedin, meeting with former flatmate Emma for a jolly catch-up, having an enthusiastic person “help” me by picking up my phone that I’d put on the ground right by my feet so I could take down a poster at an event, only to watch them accidentally drop it down three flights of stairs…
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Title via: The Beatles’ Glass Onion from The White Album. One of their more intriguing contributions…
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Music lately:
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, sung by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, from the film A Mighty Wind. This is absolutely my favourite film, and having it on my iPod made the four plane trips over the weekend much more bearable. This song is gorgeous even though it’s sending up the folk music genre, and Catherine O’Hara is just…perfect. Makes me want to learn the autoharp. Sincerely.
Bloodbuzz Ohio from The National’s new album High Violet. The album itself didn’t set me on fire but this song is a stunner and really showcases everything that’s good about The National. And you can check out a lengthier review I did of High Violet here at The Corner if you like.

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Next time: I’ll hopefully be a touch more awake. It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend in a day or two, nothing like a Monday off to make you feel unbendingly fond of the monarchy. I found this really cool recipe for pumpkin bread that I’m keen to try, I also am thinking of getting the crock pot out from its hiding place, it’s now definitely cold enough out there…

now let me welcome everybody to the wild wild west

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So, the novelty of a Monday at home is less novelty-ish when I’m coughing like a beast. Typing is a nice distraction from my chapped throat, but I’d sooner just get better. I’ve been downing tea made from lemon and ginger slices, crunching on vitamin C and echinacea, and sippin’ on gees linctus and juice. I’d had plenty of gees linctus when I was younger, but it turns out these days you have to state your intentions and hand over photo ID to get it, and it no longer comes in a pretty flask with a fancy label, but instead a tiny prescription bottle with one of those child-proof lids that are really difficult to remove.

I also have a whole mess of lozenges which are pretty good for noise control when I start coughing heaps. They were definitely useful at Tim’s graduation on Thursday. There were about forty thousand people (well, it felt like at least that many) getting graduated that night and I’m pretty sure not one of them wanted some lady spluttering during their moment of glory. In case you’re wondering, Tim was graduating with Honours in Media Studies which makes him super-qualified to do all sort of interesting things that no-one out there seems to need people to do right now, but fingers crossed that market opens up soon…Either way I’m pretty proud.
Tim’s family came down to be there for the graduation as well and his mum gifted us some bananas. There’s nothing I like more than a little unpremeditated push towards baking. Muffins felt a too obvious, but I couldn’t be bothered with anything too high-concept either. What a quandary. Then I remembered this eye-catchingly named recipe that I found while hopping from blog to blog like a frog on a lily-pad. It’s called Ponderosa Cake. According to the friendly person whose blog I found it on, the cake is named after some regional pine trees. Secretly I hope it was so named because someone wanted to immortalise their passion for Bonanza in baked form.
Ponderosa Cake
Recipe inspired by a recipe found on Chocolate & Chakra. I say inspired because I completely mucked things up as I went along – didn’t have enough butter, added 2 eggs by mistake instead of one, forgot the yoghurt till it was about to go in the oven – so the end result was almost a completely different cake…
100g soft butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2-3 large, ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda
1/2 cup plain yoghurt or sour cream

125g good chocolate, chopped roughly
1 -2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup brown sugar
Set your oven to 180 C/350 F and line a square or rectangular cake tin with baking paper. Cream the butter and sugar together till fluffy, then beat in the eggs. Add the bananas, then fold in the flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Finally mix in the yoghurt, plus half the chopped chocolate and cinnamon. Spread it into the cake tin, then sprinkle over the rest of the chocolate and cinnamon, plus the brown sugar. Bake for 25-30 minutes.
I’d rather have a thousand coughs than a blocked nose and lose my sense of taste, because Ponderosa Cake is incredibly good. It’s very light and tender and keeps well. The blast of heat in the oven caramelises the spiced, sugary chocolate topping slightly, providing depth of flavour and a pleasing gritty crunch to the moist, banana-y base. Happily, it used some of the treats I picked up at the recent food show – like The Collective yoghurt and Whittakers chocolate. Despite the fact that I somehow managed to get things wrong every step of the way, this is really a very straightforward cake. It’s ideal for those times where you want something a little out of the ordinary but not so far out of the ordinary that you’re up at 6am measuring the temperature and viscosity of sugar syrups.
I’m not sure if Hoss and Little Joe ever bonded over banana cake, but it’s a nice thought, right? I understand when my mum and her brothers and sisters were growing up, Bonanza was appointment viewing on TV… You know you want to hear that theme song again!
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Title via: 2Pac featuring Dr Dre, California Love. I know, it’s one state over from the Ponderosa. There couldn’t be a more obvious song that springs to mind for the sadly late Tupac Shakur, but no matter how often it’s thrashed it’s still a goodie, and one of those songs I knew all the words to (except for an embarrassingly long time I thought it was “city of corn chips” instead of “Compton”, what can I say, there was no Google back then.)
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Music lately:

The Music and the Mirror from A Chorus Line. This song is actually mostly dancing but the singing that’s there is so gorgeous – the line “I’ll do you proud” slays me a bit. It’s a song about a woman who needs a job, so she’s auditioning for the chorus even though she is good enough to be a star. Well, it seems a bit more dramatic when set to music anyway, and the original Donna McKechnie is pretty incomparable but there’s plenty of fun to be found on youtube of that amazing dance in the red skirt. If you’ve only seen the film version of A Chorus Line, they cut this song – criminal!
The Ali and Toumani album, a recently-released collaboration between the late Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. It’s…an absolute beauty.
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Next time: well, hopefully I my immune system and I become friends again. I’m down in Christchurch on Friday for Chartfest then Dunedin on Saturday for Smokefreerockquest so I can’t afford to be this germtastic.